Aug 30th, 2012

Author: Robyn

Thanks to everyone who came out to take on the Eat Clean, Train Dirty Challenge which started on Monday. Due to the large number of participants, our money-pot is pretty substantial. Let the games begin!

Some of the highlights from our meeting in case you couldn’t make it:

Eat Clean:

- CFO Guidelines distributed. These are simple and straight-forward and a great starting point. Over time, you need to find out what works for you personally and tweak it to your particular needs. The best way to do this is my trial and error, perhaps by applying these guidelines over a 6-week period and then slowly adding back ‘forbidden foods’ and noting the effect?

- Get a partner. This is a great way to stay accountable, get past cravings and other moments of weakness and it really does make it more fun. Share recipes, tips/tricks, whining and other good stuff.

- Find a challenge, take it on and don’t cheat. It should be something that is tough for you, thus the challenge. Some examples are to eat 100% paleo, give up sugar/alcohol/caffeine/dairy for the entire 6-week period. This is a chance to see some serious improvements in performance and aesthetics, plus dominating your weaknesses makes you feel strong and leads to success.

Train Dirty (Tips from Mini):

- Train at least 3x/week

- Train the whole body

- Don’t neglect strength training

- Cycle intensity (1 day super high, 1 day medium, 1 day low/medium)

- Take care of recovery (roll out, get plenty of sleep, etc.)

Ok, my tips of the week:

- Make sure you are eating enough total food over the course of the day. You should never feel like you are hungry. Conversely, you should never feel uncomfortably full.

- Drink lots and lots of water/sparkling water/tea

- Sleep as much as you can. You should be able to wake up without the assistance of an alarm clock (what??)

- Don’t just search for recipes on paleo sites. Take your favorite recipes and adjust them to suit your clean eating. For example, the recipe pictured above is from a recipe called Chicken Marbella (epicurious.com) and calls for whole chicken, brown sugar and wine. I use chicken thighs, so I can make a ton of it for less money and leave out the brown sugar. You can easily leave out the white wine as well.